David,

> It is difficult for me to understand your hostility directed toward me and
> my simple message posted yesterday.  Believe me, it was not my intention
> to ruffle your feathers in any way.

Easy, easy...no hostility intended.  It's more like people like me have the
need to fix stuff, even when it's not broken.  Maybe I used the wrong imagery.
:-)

>  But I see no reason to apologize for "nonsense conclusions", as you put
> it.

Again, sorry...I didn't mean to come across that harshly.  It seems a few
posters were making comments tongue-in-cheek and it's hard to gauge facial
expressions via e-mail.

Here's another way to look at it (and I apologize in advance if you know this
and I'm insulting your intelligence):

Take a garden hose, filled with water, one end slightly elevated from the
other.  The rest of the hose can dangle freely.  Now add some water to the
slightly elevated section.  The lower end will leak water until the inside
level of the higher end is even with the lower end of the hose.  The point is
that it took almost no work to to get that water out, even though there's a
significant uphill climb from the bottom of the hose that's dangling down to
the top.  The only work it took was that of overcoming the friction in the
hose.

If you were to somehow invert the hose without air getting into the system, say
by putting the one end into a bucket, and suspending the previously dangled
portion somehow, it would take no more work than the previous scenario simply
because it's a closed system.

A good test of all this is by siphoning water from one bucket to another with a
piece of hose.  As long as you have a solid column of water and the endpoints
of the hoses are the same relative height, it doesn't matter what the rest of
the hose is doing.

What does all this mean for our beloved waterboxers?  It doesn't matter whether
you're driving uphill or downhill.  What does matter is that we've got LOTS of
plumbing causing friction, more so than the typical car where radiator and
engine are in the front.  Therefore, our water pump has to work harder than
typical cars.

Regards,

-Karl

Karl & Kristina Bloss, Trexlertown, PA - '87 Weekender "Bev" - 199K Miles
http://www.enter.net/~bloss/vw - vanagon@makarov.com
VW Shop List: http://www.enter.net/~bloss/vw/vwshops
PA/NJ/DE/MD area VW bus "group" http://www.enter.net/~bloss/vw/pavanagon
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